So, as the entire world, his mum, Judy next door, the dog down the road, its previous owner and the entire population of Liechenstein (7) have pointed out, CERN have turned on the “Big Bang Machine” and the world isn’t ended. Yet. I personally don’t care about the actual potential of the world ending, but do care about the fact that everyone is talking about the LHC and knows that CERN exists, a situtation that I find hard to believe would have occurred without all this end of the world stuff.

I see a plot.

Now, I know I see plots everywhere, from the difficulties I have locating socks to the size of the hole in the Pentagon roof (to say nothing of J.D. Tippit), but imagine the scene:

FADE FROM BLACK to the ivy encrusted towers of CERN, the Matterhorn looming large in the background. Our protagonists, TED THE RANDOM PHYSICIST and TONY THE DRUNK MARKETER are reclining upon silken cushions in the well groomed CERN gardens. Houseboys bring them cocktails with umbrellas in as dusky maidens fan them with large leaves.

TED: Well Tone, me old mucker, we’re running out of cash. Houseboys don’t grow on trees and we’re going through a crate a week. We need to do something.

TONY: What about that explodey thing that you guys are building underground at the moment, can’t you sell that or something?

TED: How do you know about the death ray? I’ll have those workmen executed, I knew you couldn’t trust the french to keep their mouths shut. Oh, wait a mo – do you mean the LHC?

TONY: LHC, that’s a crap name. It’s no wonder you lot don’t have any cash. The plebs can’t even agree how to pronounce Hadron, so how are they going to tell their governments to kick you back some beer money?

TED: So, what do you reckon we need to do?

TONY: Simple. For a bunch of scarily intelligent people you guys really are a bit on the dumb side…

TED: We’re not actually all that clever, we import clever people and then hide them out of the way when the dignitaries visit. After they’ve painted everything along the tour route that is.

TONY: Well, you do at least do some things right. Anyway, what we need is a couple of sacrificial physicists, ones that are respected enough that the pseudoscience rags will listen to them, but not respected enough that other physicists will believe them. If they like money and want to retire to somewhere far away then all the better. We get them to tell everyone that the LHC will end the world, the mad people will pick up on it, justify it with pseudoscience, probably involving the mystical properties of pyramids, and then the BBC will report it. If we can get Trevor McDonald to include it as an “And Finally…” we’ll be made.

TED: But surely that will just get us shut down?

TONY: Certainly not, the wonderful middle class semi-intellectuals will take in the doom-saying, publically poo-pooing it while secretly half believing that there may be a ring of truth to it. In order to assuage their own fears they will talk endlessly about it, pushing it to the forefront of the mind of the media, giving us the exposure that funding bodies love. We’ll get a few people on the TV as experts and the money will roll in. Soon you’ll have so many cushions to recline on you’ll have to start filling them with swiss francs and burn them just to make space for the next container of used bills. Maybe we could tie this all in with a rerelease of Angels and Demons, maybe a film?

TED: But that’s a pile of crap.

TONY: Yeah, but throw Tom Hanks and Ron Howard a few million dollars and they’ll polish any turd until they can see their faces in it. Also, we need a new name – LHC doesn’t work for the non-geeky. We need something short, catchy and ridiculously overblown…

TED: The Machine of Truely Lovely Extreme Y-boson Collision, Reversal, Unmaking and Explosion?

TONY: That’s just a really bad backronym of Motley Crüe. You should be ashamed…

TED: I am. Every day. I barely leave my houseboys and leaf waving ladies. At least they accept me for who I am.

TONY: What about… THE BIG BANG MACHINE!

TED: Tony, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship…

TONY: I hate you.

FADE TO BLACK with the sound of cash registers chiming in the background mixed the bubbling sobs of houseboys being put back into their boxes.

However it happened, I’m glad that the world has now noticed that there are cool things happening underground in Switzerland, and not only the digging to find Nazi gold and Lemuria. Let’s just hope we at least get a flying car out of this.